Automobile Safety

In 1965 Ralph Nader, an American lawyer and consumer-protection advocate, published the book Unsafe at Any Speed, in which he argued that poor automobile design was a major contributor to 50,000 highway deaths annually in the United States. The U.S. Congress responded in 1966 with legislation regulating automobile design for the first time and established the National Safety Bureau, later renamed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which was empowered to set standards for cars and trucks manufactured after January 15, 1968. Among early standards were those requiring collapsible steering columns; padded instrument panels; seat belts for all passengers; recessed or breakaway switches and handles; door side-beam reinforcement bars to absorb impacts from the side; front and rear bumpers designed to absorb 8-km/h impacts without damage; side-mounted reflectors or lights enabling drivers to see other cars better at night; dual brake cylinders; and improved fuel tanks to reduce leakage in accidents.

In the 1970s the NHTSA required that cars be constructed so that passengers could survive 48-km/h impacts against immovable barriers. A “passive restraint” standard was proposed that would require manufacturers to devise automatic passenger restraint systems. Air bags that, upon impact, automatically inflate in a fraction of a second were developed as one solution, but automakers resisted installing them because of high costs and concern over reliability. A second solution was “passive” seat belts that do not require passengers to fasten the belts themselves. In 1984, after years of debate over regulatory proposals, the Department of Transportation mandated the phasing in of automatic crash protection for American-built cars to begin in 1986; by 1989, unless states representing two-thirds of the populace made the wearing of seat belts mandatory, all cars would have to be equipped with the automatic devices. Improved automotive safety features, improved highways, and a national speed limit of 88 km/h helped reduce the nation's highway fatality rate from 5.21 per 100 million mi driven in 1969 to 3.46 a decade later.

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